People have a tendency to behave as if a thing doesn’t exist if we haven’t given it a name.

Think about it. There was no such thing as word processing until somebody invented the word processor. Of course, people used to create and edit documents before that but, back then, it was simply called typing.

That’s why people also tend to talk about nonemployer businesses as if there weren’t any before 1997, when the Census Bureau started counting them every year. So, the oldest nonemployer businesses around are supposed to be ten years old or so.

Before that, they were just (very small) small businesses. And nobody needed to care about them because no small business owner was supposed to want to stay that small.

One of the assumptions operating here is that technology was supposed to have made nonemployer business possible, and potentially viable. Before the technological advances in telecommunications and computing that took place in the 1990s, the argument that ‘there’s only so much one person can get done’ seemed to hold a lot of force.

Of course, it has always been true that there’s only so much one person can accomplish in any 24-hour period. Technology has not changed that; it has simply changed how much qualifies as ‘so much.’

Whether or not ‘so much’ is enough depends on what you want, how badly you want it, and what you are prepared to do to get it.

Technology hasn’t changed any of that, either.

If anything, technology has made it seem more possible for one person — a nonemployer business — to make a lot more money than they really need. But, making it more possible does not necessarily make it any more desirable.

All of which explains why nonemployer businesses remain in the dog house as far as almost everybody in the small business sphere is concerned.

Nowadays, the thinking goes, the only reason for a nonemployer to fail to earn a bucket of money is because they don’t want to. And most nonemployer businesses are operated by people who are perfectly happy to earn enough for their needs and no more.

It often seems that small business policy makers and advocates both want to punish us because we are lacking in avarice. I suspect that a big part of the reason for that is that they know so little about us.

Besides, even in this day and age, the pursuit of happiness is worth something … at least, it is to some of us.